A Metatheoretical Critique of Immanuel Wallerstein's "The Modern World System"

Author(s): Stanley Aronowitz

Source: Theory and Society, Vol. 10, No. 4 (Jul., 1981), pp. 503-520
Published by: Springer
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/657151
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 503

A METATHEORETICAL CRITIQUE OF IMMANUEL

WALLERSTEIN'S THE MODERN WORLD SYSTEM

STANLEY ARONOWITZ

The revival of studies in historical sociology in the past decade is a w

corrective to the empiricist tendencies in both history and sociology.
trast to the fruitful, but narrow studies of historians, historical socio
less concerned with the validity of its sources to explain the details of
than with their meaning and structural significance in relation to ot
ments in society. On the other hand, sociology in the United States h
marked by an almost pervasive disinterest in history as an element of
tion of present and future social relations. With the exception of mar
Weberian writers, sociologists often proceed as if the past was constitu
disconnected from the present.

Not since Karl Polanyi's seminal work The Great Transformation

appeared more than thirty-five years ago, has a single book made as g
impact on reviving historical studies in this country as The Modern
System. Immanuel Wallerstein is a leading figure in the movement in A
scholarship that wishes to understand the dynamics of historical cha
to see social structure within a larger temporal canvas. The boldness
approach, his capacity to combine close attention to a specific period
theory of historical transformation, is a kind of model of historical so
Many of Wallerstein's critics have missed the point of his research b
they have examined the validity of the theory of the origins of capi
advanced in The Modern World System from the standpoint of histo
discipline. That is, they have assumed that the question is whether Wa
is empirically right without examining the theoretical scaffolding tha
it. The point of view of my essay is Wallerstein's own ground; the att
generate a metatheory of historical development using the origins and
ment of capitalism as a case study. For, even though the scope of the s
employed in this work is nothing less than magisterial, Wallerstein is
torian. He is asking questions about social structure rather than o
plausible explanations for the causes of particular events. His assu
which I take as entirely right, is that the former cannot be undertaken
reference to the latter and that this omission is the central sin of modern

Department of Sociology, University of California, Irvine.

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504

toriography. Therefore the starting point of a discussion of The Modern World

System must begin with an analysis of its project. That is, I propose to focus
on the logic of the work rather than beginning with its correspondence with
the way things actually happened. This mode of inquiry has been termed
metatheoretical because it takes the presuppositions of theory as central to its
heuristic importance. Such an approach is consistent with Wallerstein's own
claim to have made a contribution to the theory of social change rather than
offering a new history of the origins of capitalism. "I was not interested in
writing its history," according to Wallerstein.1 Instead, he wishes to provide
what he terms a "conceptualization" of the modern world system that would
determine "research tools" needed to explore many aspects of the history of
the modern world system.

This is informed by the metatheoretical proposition of Wallerstein's work -

the priority of the whole to any of its parts. Wallerstein states that he is
"looking to describe the world system at a certain level of abstraction, that
of evolution of the structures of the world system."2 The perspective that
structure is prior to particular aspects is shared by social theorists, particularly
those from the marxist and Weberian schools, who hold that the abstract is,
under certain conditions, more concrete than particulars because it establishes,
at least potentially, the possibility of making links between apparently dis-
parate parts. Wallerstein is aware of the dangers of this line of argument since
to constitute the object of knowledge as a system that embraces more than
a single juridical political unity deprives the investigator of the "comparable
instances" that are surely among the important methodological tools of social
science. For the system as such logically occludes such instances since it con-
stitutes them rather than being conceived as consisting of a simple aggregate
of its parts. Instead Wallerstein argues for the importance of perceiving the
whole in order to engage the broad processes of social reconstruction, not
only concerning history, but for our own time as well. For Wallerstein,
knowledge of the totality is made necessary by a commitment to work for
the "good society". His search, therefore, for a broader conceptualization
than is possible under the diachronic mode of logical investigation that neces-
sarily searches for the particularity of events as a clue to the whole, is informed
methodologically by the hypothetic-deductive method and the argument that
social commitment cannot be abstracted either methodologically or ideologi-
cally from research. Further, the a priori assumption that the point of view of
the totality is necessary for understanding the particulars of history is a major
contribution of this work to the general debate concerning the efficacy of the
empiricist models upon which much historical writing is based.

My quarrels with The Modern World System are not with these presupposi-

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 505

tions, but with the specificity of meaning attached to the concept of system
employed in this study. I will argue below that the concept of system is not
used in a manner consistent with Wallerstein's own intentions - that is, the
meaning of "system" is not homologous in this work with the marxist notion
of "totality," in which the elements of a system are understood within a
matrix of mutual determinations. Instead Wallerstein offers the term in its
precise contemporary sense, most typically employed by those in various
natural and social sciences who subscribe to the specific metaphilosophic and
methodological theory known as systems theory. For the system of which
Wallerstein speaks is a structured totality consisting of relatively autonomous
elements whose interaction constitutes the whole. And, as in systems theory,
the system is the determining instance of its elements, each of which is con-
stituted as a subsystem by its structured place within the larger structure.
Further, he accepts the concept of integrative levels as the chief mechanism
of the modern world system. That is, capitalism was always a world system
based on the primacy of the economic over the political and cultural. Social
change, particularly the decline of feudalism, can be ascribed generally to its
inability to integrate potentially antagonistic subsystems. Capitalism persists
as long as it is able to integrate the disparate levels or elements that constitute
it but may be antagonistic to it (for example, the national state as a limited
political-juridical unit with its own interests).

The rise of systems theory occurred in some natural sciences as a result of

crisis tendencies that had appeared among them in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. The second law of thermodynamics which posited the
"winding down" of the world owing to energy limits in a closed system and
the conflict between wave and corpuscular theories of matter were two severe
blows to the mechanistic view of the universe that had been articulated by
Newtonian mechanics. According to Ludwig Bertalanffy, the first to make a
claim for systems theory as a paradigmatic "breakthrough":

The 19th and the first half of the 20th century conceived of the world as chaos ...
the living world appeared as a product of chance, the outcome of random mutations
and survival in the mill of natural selection. In the same sense, human personality, in
the theories of behaviorism as well as of psychoanalysis, was considered a chance
product of nature and nurture.

Bertalanffy saw the world as organization; new sciences came into existence
"being concerned one way or another with 'systems', 'wholes' or organiza-
tion."3 The concept of systems theory was essentially tied to a different view
of the processes of historical evolution as necessary rather than accidental
based on the capacity of organization to integrate its interacting components
as a fusion that achieves stability over time. It may be asserted that the domi-

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506

nant tendencies of all twentieth century science, including the social sciences,
has been to resolve the apparent indeterminacy of social and natural phenomena
by positing a higher level of abstraction in which the historicity of things is
explained by their failure to fulfill determinate goals. Here, there should be
no confusion with the purposivity of teleology. Goal directed behavior is
understood by systems theory to be a quality or characteristic of all organisms
and social and natural structures. Wallerstein follows this view by positing the
centrality of the category of expansion as the stability producing element in
any social system. Any system that fails to fulfill this goal will give way to a
new system. Thus, as I shall demonstrate below, the modern world system,
Capitalism, comes into existence because feudalism was unable to stabilize
itself on the basis of growth.

For some time, there has raged a debate among marxist historians and social
theorists concerning the transition from feudalism to capitalism because,
beyond the particular issues involved in the questions of capitalism's origins,
they have been concerned with clarifying the unfinished work of Marx and
Engels in elaborating the general laws of historical change. At issue are two
levels of historical judgement. The first is the relation between the internal
contradictions of the feudal order, particularly divisions over the appropriation
of the social surplus between lord and serf and the fall of the feudal system.
The position that seeks to explain the processes of systemic transformation
by reference to the class structure of the old mode of production insists that
any other perspective is not consistent with the methodological a priori of
dialectical method that insists upon discovering the rise and fall of systems
according to their structuration by sets of internal relations. Thus, to discover
the determining instance of feudalism's collapse in extrinsic phenomena is
theoretically inconsistent even before its empirical status can be determined.4

The second position may be described as the cancer theory of social trans-
formation. According to this view the bourgeoisie, permitted to accumulate
capital in the service of a feudal nobility that increasingly needs loans to pay
debts incurred by both crop failures carised by climatic conditions and
mounting costs generated by wars of land redivision, as well as maintenance
of certain perquisities of class privilege, outgrows the limits imposed upon it
by the feudal order. Finding itself "fettered" by restrictions designed to pre-
vent its political and economic power, it launches an attack against the nobil-
ity and its political/ideological institutions, the state and the Church. Accord-
ing to this theory, the problems for feudalism were not those generated from
its core social relations of production, except insofar as the merchant classes
themselves were created by the system as a contradictory class, since its func-
tion was to circulate commodities and transform them into capital under a

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 507

system based upon subsistence production. Thus the contradiction is portrayed

by such writers as Paul Sweezy who promulgated this version of the origin of
capitalism as one between two systems which occupy the same historical
space.5

The virtue of the marxist debate is that both positions assume that the crisis
of the feudal system in the late middle ages lay, in one way or another, with-
in its social structure. Whatever other conditions contribute to the processes
of fundamental transformation, it is the relations among classes that consti-
tute society through its productive activity that become the sufficient condi-
tion for change. Within this framework, even Weber's contribution to under-
standing the transformation of religion as an aspect of the process of transi-
tion from fedualism to capitalism is consistent with this view. For Weber's
objection to marxism was based upon the tendency of Marx's immediate
epigones to characterize the determination of superstructural phenomena
such as ideology, religion, and the state as an efflux of the economic infra-
structure. His point in the Prostestant Ethic was that the development of
capitalism out of feudalism was a system of mutual determinations in which
ideologies and religion especially played a relatively autonomous role. But, as
other works in Weber's historical sociology demonstrate, the primacy of the
social relations within a structure was always the point of departure for inves-
tigation. Similarly, even in the so-called extrinsic explanation for the crisis of
the feudal system, the new mode of production is portrayed as arising within
feudal society and, for a time, exists alongside it both as an antagonistic sys-
tem within a system and as a necessary part of it. The struggle between the
bourgeoisie and the feudal nobility is merely the political expression of the
irreconcilability of modes of production whose mode of surplus appropria-
tion, technological development, and whose conceptions of morals and politics
cannot be integrated.

Wallerstein is neither consistently working in the Weberian or marxist para-

digms of historical change. He attributes the passing of feudalism to a "con-
junctural crisis" of cyclical, secular, and climatological factors. According to
Wallerstein, the cyclical crisis was produced by the fact that expansion,
having reached its optimal point within a given technology, was bound to end
and a period of stagnation would set in. The secular trends are grounded in
the traditional Smithian concept of diminishing returns on the land which
limited the capacity of the feudal economy to achieve the requisite level of
surplus appropriation required by its population. The third element of the
decline was the climatic shift that occurred during the fourteenth and fif-
teenth centuries in Europe that further limited output. For Wallerstein, this
conjuncture produced the necessity for European expansion on a new basis:

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508

"The territorial expansion of Europe was theoretically a key requisite for the
solution for the 'crisis of feudalism'."6 Even though Wallerstein acknow-
ledges the class struggle between serf and lord within feudal Europe and the
importance of a discontented class of capitalist entrepreneurs in the towns,
neither of these account for the supercession of feudalism by capitalism. The
heart of Wallerstein's thesis is his multifactored analysis that draws its meth-
odological tools from levels of analysis that are essentially incommensurable.
For it must be admitted that the concept of conjuncture itself implies such
bricolage, that is, the construction of a theoretical edifice using materials
randomly drawn from what is at hand. The categories of climate, cycle, and
secularity (in the economic sense of its usage) do not refer to discourses that
are situated on the same theoretical terrain. Wallerstein's methodological
premise of feudalism's decay is the denial of a single causal nexus. "It was
precisely the immense pressures of this conjuncture that made possible the
enormity of social change"7 from feudalism to capitalism. But, surely, this is
so historically specific that one is tempted to ask whether there is any prin-
ciple involved in the analysis at all. That is, one suspects that Wallerstein has
gone to the extreme in refusing the central concept of structural unity upon
which marxist historical explanation is based. Having talked about a system,
on the one hand, and eschewed systematic inquiry on the other, Wallerstein
leaves us with the impression that change is a function not of the internal
contradictions of a system but of pure contingency. For, as I will argue
below, what is problematic in the Modern World System is not the quality of
its scholarship as some have alleged, but the philosophical foundations upon
which it is based that implicity challenge the very notion of causality in social
and historical processes.

In the first place, in his analysis of the crisis of feudalism Wallerstein swallows
whole the premises of classical political economy that owes its origins to
Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus - the law of diminishing returns within a
given technology - the more dubious notion of cyclical theory that has mul-
tiple roots, most recently advanced by Arnold Toynbee but also Joseph
Shumpeter, and, finally, the remarkable uncritically adopted idea that climatic
conditions may be an independent variable in the transformation of social
structure, unmediated by that structure itself. In all of these ideas there is no
dynamic of internal relations into which the variables may be placed. That is,
Wallerstein has no theory of social change as an outgrowth of the crisis of the
social relations that structure a social system. It is not merely that Wallerstein's
theory lacks rigor or that these eclectic causes are enumerated to explain the
decline of the old order. Rather, in what is really Wallerstein's major interest,
to generate a theory of capitalist development as a world system of exchange
relations that is shaped by its world-wide character rather than by the melange

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 509

of national features, he has been constrained to argue that the solution of the
crisis of the feudal order could only be the processes of expansion. Since the
three factors offered to explain the incapacity of feudalism to expand owing
to features that are, by definition, counterexpansive, only a new social system
could achieve the needed result. Thus Wallerstein defines capitalism as a sys-
tem which expands. It constructs a set of relations that disregards national
borders, or to be more precise, regards nation states as both the condition and
the barrier to expansion.

I do not wish to dwell on the functionalist elements in Wallerstein's theory,

but it seems clear that when expansion (the cyclical theory) and its other
variant, the capacity for surplus appropriation (secular trends) are conjoined,
the decline of feudalism could not lead to anything but a world systems
approach. It becomes logical for such a theory to find in the history of explo-
rations (Portugal, Spain, England), hence of world trade in the sixteenth cen-
tury, the key to capitalism's formation and development. Thus Wallerstein
comes out on the extrinsic side of the debate about capitalism's origins. But
the deeper implication of Wallerstein's theory of history is contained in the
primacy of the category of expansion. Between the two types of world sys-
tems posited in Wallerstein's thesis (empires and the modern) there were the
subsistence economies of the feudal order, but these were marginal to the
dominant structure of world history, the political or economic domination of
the world through conquest and/or trade. To conceive of the capitalist mode
of production as a system of relations, according to Wallerstein, is to insist
on the conjunction among political systems and types of the division of labor
as separate subsystems, elements whose interaction determine the system as a
whole. Wallerstein's implied theory of historical periodicity offers a conception
of states markedly different from either Marx or Weber. The ancient, feudal
and capitalist modes of production are referred to but their meaning has
changed. The new stages are subsistence, empires, and modern systems, and
subsistence economies appear as a kind of interlude between the two major
kinds of world system.

Thus, the genuine metatheory proposed in The Modem World System is akin
to the systems approach to science. Unlike Marx, for whom the commodity
form and its concomitant, the transformation of labor power into a commod-
ity, contained all the elements of the capitalist mode of production (in the
metaphor of the acorn and the tree, the gene and the prototype), Wallerstein
argues that capitalism is a system of systems, that its elements are relatively
autonomous. Change can only be explained in terms of conjuctures. Conse-
quently social relations change their meaning. They are now defined as rela-
tions of domination among subsystems located within autonomous spaces.

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510

Consistent with some contemporary redefinitions of class theory, Wallerstein

holds that Europe was a one class society in the sixteenth century because of
the conjuncture of a highly rationalized division of labor, a strong political
state, and unequal exchange on a world scale that privileged Europe. Since
the peasantry or the nascent working classes possessed high levels of economic
or political motivation in this period and, hence, could not constitute them-
selves as classes in the historical meaning of the term, only the bourgeoisie
acted as a class. The other classes in the framework of the modern world
system theory were situated in the dominated spaces covered by it. In
Wallerstein's reprise, class struggle has meaning solely on a global plane and
is not necessarily intrinsic to the national state. Here Wallerstein must be
placed within the schema proposed by Andre Gunder Frank8 and other depen-
dency theorists who have argued that underdevelopment is not a lack, but is a
form of development made necessary by the relations of unequal exchange
within the world system. Consistent with the systems approach, these theo-
rists have opposed the idea that capitalism passes through stages of develop-
ment such that relations of domination associated with modern imperialism
has specific historical origins in the class struggle within various national
states. Instead, the alternative contention asserts that systems are structured
totalities constituted from the outset by determinate relations. The relations
are characterized by domination and inequality between geographically situ-
ated societies.

The theory of external relations is entirely in concert with the new modernist
marxism proposed by Louis Althusser and his school. In this connection it is
not suprising that Wallerstein acknowledges the influence of the French his-
torian Ferdinand Braudel, whose work on the early period of capitalism stresses
the importance of the exigencies of exchange for the system as a whole. The
question of situating Wallerstein then depends on whether one accepts the
critique, offered by structuralists from Levi-Strauss to the post-structuralists
such as Derrida, of Hegelian concepts of history that are said to inhere in tra-
ditional marxisms. For them, internal relations are subsumed in the synchrony
of the overall structure of a system which is presumed adequate to explain its
stable state. History becomes a function neither of the absolute spirit as in
Hegel or in the class struggles that occur within a social formation. It is the
formation itself that configures class struggles, but since it is constituted on a
world scale it cannot be rent by means of transformations that occur in a
single nation state or even on a continental level. The questions of external
mechanisms of causality then rely on the philosophic rejection of the notion
of classes as a priori subjects. The structure is the true condition of all social
development.

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 511

Wallerstein has implicity adopted a paradigm of society that is close to ther-

modynamic models of modern systems theory that wishes to ascribe the
persistence of physical and biological structures over time to the exchanges of
energy and the environment. In turn this exchange relation is presumed to
underlie interactions among elements of an organism or physical body. Hence
Wallerstein's focus on expansion and contraction, a metabolic metaphor which
also informs some theories of imperialism and dependency. The ahistoricity
of Wallerstein's views consists in his refusal to restrict this imperative to
capitalism (which marxists argue requires expansion because of its logic of
accumulation). Instead, he applies the same general imperative to all societies
and explains their capacity to achieve a stable state on the basis of this thermo-
dynamic analogy. My first major observation is that Wallerstein's epistemolo-
gical assumptions owe much to the attempt to make historical sociology as
rigorous as natural sciences are presumed to be. Of course, this effort is well
within the major traditions of American social science whose recourse to
statistical probabilities and reliance on model building is too well known to be
more than mentioned here.

To be sure, much of contemporary marxism has, to one degree or another,

accepted the goal of natural scientific rigor in the study of society. But there
are various criticial marxisms influenced by theoretical tendencies that are
outside the orthodox tradition, such as phenomenology, that challenge the
attempt to construct social theory and research on the presuppositions of
natural science on the ground that interaction modes mediate social relations
in ways that differ qualitatively from both physical and biological sciences.
One of the premises upon which the objection to the application of natural
scientific methods to society is based is that levels of reality are not isomorphic
in their structures, but contain different principles of organization. Wallerstein
does not engage himself in this type of discourse and is therefore prone to
unreflexive modes of inquiry that have led him down paths that are probably
unwanted. Take the proposition that expansion is a property of all social sys-
tems or they must die. Critical theory would refuse this formulation as ahis-
torical and would argue that societies are not understood by cyclical theories
that purport to explain contraction by means of "natural" causes. Nor is
"growth" an invariant property of social formations. These disputes cannot
be settled empirically but must be argued on the basis of metatheoretical
assumptions that underlie research. To be sure, Wallerstein does not argue his
starting points either, but tries to account for well-known events such as
feudalism's decline by means of them.

Second, the concept of system as employed in contemporary "systems" phi-

losophy as a basis for characterizing the capitalist mode of production refuses

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512

one of the central definitions offered by Marx: the universalization of com-

modity production and relations of production in which labor has been freed
from obligations to the land. Wallerstein, of course, would not deny these are
features of capitalism. But, following Weber, Wallerstein focuses on capitalism
as a specific system of labor rationalization and of unequal exchange, and
displaces the question of exploitation, substituting inequality derived from
what Weber calls "access to commodity and labor market" opportunities.9
Thus, it is important not to confuse Wallerstein's account of the origins or
the main features of capitalism with marxism. This, in itself, is of little
importance, provided one is prepared to shift the focus of historical change
from a theory of internal relations to conjunctures and from production to
exchange.

Let us tum to the specific theory. Wallerstein's concept of the modem world
system relies on the proposition that the economic self-interest of associated
individuals, motivated by maximum profits, forms a world system of unequal
exchange. Moreover, the origins of that system are traced to the expansion of
trade in western European countries, prompted by a series of geographic,
climatic, economic, and social conditions whose conjunction gave rise to a
division of labor defined as differential modes of labor control distributed be-
tween western Europe, a layer of intermediate countries, and what Wallerstein,
following Andre Gunder Frank, calls the periphery. Wallerstein posits this sys-
tem, created at about the sixteenth century, as a social fact, that is, it is not
reducible to any of its component parts and subsumes these parts as depen-
dent variables of the system. Its internal composition consists in a series
of core nations who occuppy a position of dominance over peripheral nations.
The system is formed out of the unequal exchange between these polar oppo-
sites. In between, there are semi-peripheral areas that are neither fully domi-
nant nor subordinate.

Wallerstein has, in effect, repeated the mode of argument that appeared in the
early 1950s among some marxists debating the origins of capitalism by a more
rigorous application of the market model of Weber. That debate centered
around the following question: can the rise of capitalism be attributed to
purely extrinsic causes - that is, the expansion of world trade within the
feudal system by the merchant classes, even those acting on behalf of the
rulers - or does the historical transition depend on principally internal con-
tradictions of feudalism that can explain the expansion of trade? In the former
case, as Sweezy and others argued, the rise of mercantile capital appears as
external to the economy of feudalism. Capitalism is brought to western
Europe, in effect, from the outside. In the latter argument, expanded trade is
explained in terms of such phenomena as peasant revolts, the low level of

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 513

agricultural productivity owing to the restraints imposed by the feudal system

on technological change, and the weakness of central state powers.10 In the
former position, capitalism arose out of a series of autonomous factors whose
relation to the feudal system was essentially exterior to its social relations but
whose effect was powerful. Wallerstein follows this line of argument and even
takes it a step further. He accepts the fundamental premise of liberal social
theory, that access to commodity and labor markets constitutes a central
dynamic of economic development as well as relative advantages within the
social structure, rather than explaining these phenomena by a conception of
social relations grounded in relations of production and the level of develop-
ment of technology and labor. Instead, these relations are themselves explained
in terms of the market fluctations, which in turn depend on many conditions
including "will and possibilities" for expansion beyond national borders. The
will is clearly related in his theory to the strength of the old buraucracy that
may accelerate or retard development, conditions of land vacancy and labor
shortage that are explained in terms of climatic and demographic conditions
that exist sui generis rather than dependent upon the development of the
mode of production in which they function as variables.

The western European countries possessed, according to Wallerstein, "a slight

edge" over their global competitors in terms of "a series of factors at a previous
time". The link between this edge and a "conjuncture of events" make
the edge one of central importance for explaining the formation of differen-
tial positions within the modern world. For Wallerstein then, the emergence
of western Europe as the center of world capitalism was due to essentially
extrinsic social and natural influences to the feudal system since both east
and west were feudal in character. The unequal system of exchange that gave
rise to differential forms of labor control between the two regions are the
outcome of these factors, but in the world system, these forms of labor con-
trol are complementary as well as antagonistic. Following classical political
economy in all respects except its theory of value, Wallerstein argues that the
west had the capacity for variety and specialization in the division of labor
owing to its ability to aggressively pursue expansion that was spurred by
agricultural productivity, a strong state that was prepared to absorb some of
the costs of expansion, and population growth that accompanied industriali-
zation.

The east suffered from the reverse problem. It had a low level of productiv-
ity in agriculture, weak towns (a weak state), no demographic growth, and no
specialization of tasks within agriculture and industry that could provide the
basis for an industrial revolution. At times, Wallerstein seems to argue for a
position that ascribes these differences to the existence of a strong bureau-

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514

cracy (especially in China) whose tenure of power depended on its ability to

retard development, and was content to keep the state weak and unresponsive
to economic expansion; at other times he tries to show that shortages of hard
currency in the west spurred the drive for exploration of precious metals
beyond national borders. A third factor was the inflation of the sixteenth
century that, in several countries, amounted to a redistribution of income and
a source of primitive capital accumulation, while in older trading centers, strong
workers' organizations managed to prevent accumulation by keeping wages
abreast of prices. In any case, Wallerstein stands firmly on one side of the
debate. His model relies heavily on factors determining the configuration of
trade relations for explaining both the transition from feudalism to capitalism
and the configuration of the world-system. At the heart of his position is a
theory akin to the hypothesis of parsimony endemic in eighteenth century
science: the gain of one is the loss of another, thus world politics and eco-
nomics after the sixteenth century may be explained as a series of events that
tended to reinforce the structuration of world trade as a system of uneqiual
exchanges.

The attractiveness of this thesis for us is not hard to understand. In the first
place, Wallerstein ratifies our own perception that our country has entered
into imperialist relations with the third world on the basis of the extraction
of raw materials, the fostering of single crop economies in agriculture, and a
dependent political and economic structure in those regions. In doing so, he
implicitly denies the traditional marxist view that, even if capitalism was a
world system as early as the sixteenth century, its development was princi-
pally due to internal relations and only became extrinsic in the late nineteenth
century. But Wallerstein really goes further. His entire theory hinges on the
assertion that the social system we call capitalism arose not from the con-
tradictions of the feudal system, but from its fringes; that is, the portion of
the social surplus generated by agriculture and guild-based manufacture that
was destined for exchange rather than for the consumption of producers
within the economy was the fundamental basis for the dissolution of the sys-
tem and the creation of the new capitalist system. In short, Wallerstein has no
theory of social relations within the feudal system and the relation of these
relations in their internal contradiction to the formation of capitalism. The
social system, for him, consists in relations of trade and power that, in turn,
give rise to a division of labor.

Which brings me to the second point. It will be recalled that Wallerstein

attempts to show that the hierarchy, variation of tasks, and specialization
constitute what he means by the new European division of labor opposed to
the old feudal system that remains a monoculture, that is, is grounded in its

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 515

agriculture mode of production. This division of labor is a world division of

labor; specialization exists among the core countries, the semi-periphery, and
the periphery as well as within the agricultural sector of the core. But
Wallerstein has a purely technical concept of the division of labor that is a
neutral concept, one that is inadequate because it excludes any specification
of the social division of labor. For the social division of labor of which marxists
speak is not principally the division of occupations and sectors, say between
carpenters and shoemakers or the town and the countryside, but a division
that gives rise to classes within the mode of production. They are .historical
divisions of a decisive character and are not denotative of external develop-
ments. In contrast, classes, for Wallerstein, are implicitly formed on the basis
of the geographical distribution of labor control and coercion that reproduces
the relations of unequal exchange. His theory of class is conflated with his
antithesis of core and periphery. Although there are many references in his
book to workers, in the core the logic of his argument would place these
workers on the side of their own bourgeoisie in the world system since they
share, however unequally, in the exploitation of the periphery. There is never
an understanding of the category of exploitation within the core on the basis
of the divisions between mental and physical labor, which is a social and not a
technical division, and the relations of property that separate the workers
from control of the conditions of production. As Brenner has pointed out,
here referring to Marx, the presuppositions of the formation of capital, or to
be more exact, the transformation of money wealth into capital is the forced
rendering of the worker as propertyless:

What enables money wealth to become capital is the encounter, on the one side,
with free workers; and on the other side with the necessaries and materials, etc. which
previously were in one way or another the property of the masses who have now
become object-less and are also free and purchasable.1

The division between capital and labor is the presupposition of trade and
expansion, of the transformation of nearly all production from production
for the immediate consumption of the producers into exchange value, not the
other way around. Because Wallerstein's concept of the division of labor
remains on the level of its specific use-character (hence the Weberian reference
to rationalization of tasks, rather than to the fundamental gulf between
ownership and non-ownership on the one hand, and between the labor of
direction and that of execution on the other). For Marx, it is the social divi-
sions rather than the technical divisions of labor that form the structure of

society. These social divisions form the basis of those technical separations of
which Wallerstein speaks.

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516

By his failure to recognize this distinction he has at one stroke conflated class
structure with geographical distribution of types of labor control so that a
hierarchy of labor control may be said to constitute his special theory of
social class, while the core/periphery distinction may be said to substitute for
a class system based on production relations within the core as well as periph-
ery. Since workers in the core enjoy, for reasons of the less coercive system of
wage labor, relative advantages, at least compared to those who are forced to
labor in the sharecropping or slave system within the periphery, the distinc-
tions between workers and capitalists in the core pale in comparison to the
broader distribution of wealth and power within the world system. The world
system theory succeeds in abolishing the specificity of class relations and
political power within the core of national states and thus leaves entirely
aside the sources of opposition that might arise in that region. Ideologies of
legitimation, questions of culture domination, etc. take on little or no impor-
tance for the relations of governments and masses in the core. Indeed,
Wallerstein enters a specific polemic against what he terms the "mystification
in the analysis of the process of legitimation caused by an almost exclusive
look at the relationship of governments to the mass of the population." "It
is doubtful that very many governments in human history have been considered
'legitimate' by the majority of those exploited, oppressed, and mistreated by
their governments."'2 The problem with this point of view is that, by ignoring
the centrality of the process by which labor is expropriated from its condi-
tions of production, from property, and its formation as a class of free wage
labor, Wallerstein sees no need to account for the specific development of
hegemonic bourgeois democratic ideologies which are already in the process
of formation in the period of capitalism's early rise. "Legitimation does not
concern the masses but the cadres," declares Wallerstein. "The question of
political stability revolves around the extent to which the small group of
managers of the state machinery is able to convince the larger group of central
staff and regional potentates both that the regime was formed and functions
on the basis of whatever consensual values these cadres can be made to believe
exist and that it is not in the interest of these cadres that this regime continue
to function without major disturbance."13 Incredible as these words sound, it
is clear that Wallerstein implictly ascribes all mass action to economic self-
interest that is oblivious to ideological influences such as religion, cultural
ideals that may infuse the minds and hearts of the bureaucracy or the
bourgeoisie itself, or indeed, aspirations that may involve such possibilities
as universal sufferage, self rule, etc. Since in the World System there is no
concrete examination of daily life within core or periphery societies, but
merely an account of various economic, climatic, geographic and demographic
factors that operated on a fairly high level of abstraction, Wallerstein could
not explore the specificity of politics and culture within the underclasses to

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 517

find how and why they acted, or whether their actions severely modified or
constituted an aspect of the determination of the direction of history. By
confining his analysis to exogenous structures and virtually ignoring the char-
acter of social relations, particularly the social division of labor, problems of
class structure and class conflict within the nation-states of the core, Wallerstein
cannot but devalue the influence of these endogenous relations.

Which brings me to my fourth objection. In the entire book, the discourse is

grounded on a spatial metaphor which is synchronic. These is no underlying
theory of history in Wallerstein's account that constitutes a moment of deter-
mination of events. Following Weber, the primacy of exchange is epistemolo-
gically carried through in the "mapping" style of all the analysis. That is, the
diachronic features of transition, of the actions of masses and classes, and
even of the significance of the events themselves are subordinated to the
modeling methodology. The modern world system is contrasted by a simple
binary opposition to anterior world empires both of which constitute them-
selves sui generis as the determination of all other economic, political, and
social structures and events. Their historical appearance is, in the last analysis
more or less accidental, resulting from the conjuncture of a series of non-com-
mensurable factors whose relation to each other is extrinsic. On the other
hand, all social development, for Wallerstein, is overdetermined; its density is
traceable neither to a simple origin nor a structure of determination that is
held together logically. Thus, the concept of a world system can only achieve
configural coherence in terms of its descriptive content, since it is strictly
separate from any of its anterior conditions, which in any case are described
by the author as a "socio-physical conjuncture" rather than a set of internal
relations. For this reason, once this conjuncture has served as an originary
explanation for the existence of the world system, its status is not merely
metaphorical, but it becomes the sufficient self-enclosed explanatory proposi-
tion to which all other factors and events refer. This is an example of a reduc-
tion or undercoding of social phenomena that serves to obliterate, after the
moment of coming into existence, all endogenous forms of explanation. To
say the least, at the level of the logic of Wallerstein's argument, his thesis bears
more than a trace of circularity and even of tautology.

What has occurred is the generation of a closed system of spatial relationships

characterized as asymmetrical and structurally invariant. Its central mechanism
is the idea of unequal exchange which produces a dependency between the
core and the semi-periphery and periphery. This dependent relation cannot be
reversed within the terms of the theoretical paradigm because the conditions
of its reproduction are contained as a logical element of the premise. To be
somewhat crude, but I hope accurate: the structure of social systems within

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518

the periphery are determined by the conditions of exchange in the world sys-
tem. Underdevelopment is produced by a system that is, essentially, beyond
the control of the periphery. Since asymmetrical relations are systemic, the
conditions of change would have as their presupposition another series of
socio-physical conjunctures which are in any case extrinsic to the system.
These conjunctures then could not in any way be predicted in advance, or to
be more exact, are as random in their probabilities as the factors that produced
the present world system.

The marxist view, on the contrary, proceeds from a theory that posits the
internal relation between forms of property, the division of labor, and the
relation of humans to nature in terms of technology and development of
labor power. These relations include relations of force and types of ideological
and political domination which are grounded in the internal social structure,
as well as the relationships on a global scale within the world system. Thus,
the world system, its unevenness of development, is explained in terms of a
determinate theory of social and production relations. Wallerstein has clearly
decided that the traditional sociological theory of systemic inequality is
grounded in a concept of human nature or, alternatively, is the result of random
factors that conjoin at a particular historic moment. He is imprisoned in "fac-
tor" theory according to which the task of the investigator is to weigh all that
is present to observation and decide which factor at the moment in question
is preponderant. These factors are the determinants of social relations, which
obtain the status of reflexes of socio-physical structures that are held to be
more or less autonomous. These include climate, demography, and geography
that are essentially independent of social development but are instead proper-
ties of nature and are conceived by Wallerstein as purely out of human con-
trol. Even the state is seen without specific determinations by the fabric of
social relations but seems to possess its own structures and operates on a logic
of bureaucratic self-survival.

What all this amounts to is the abdication of a theory of determinations on

one hand, and the adoption of a radical nominalism on the other. Hence
Wallerstein's persistent reliance on the concept of conjuncture to explain his-
tory. This concept, together with the piling on of factors, is necessary to
account for historical change because Wallerstein has no concept of internal
relations, of the structuration and the process of production and social
reproduction within which the dialectics of opposition both make a difference
and are themselves limited by the prior conditions. For Wallerstein, opposi-
tions conceived as binaries have only an antinomious existence. Core, periphery,
free and coercive labor, skills and non-skills are understood as complemen-
taries in a relatively stable system. Like others who adopt a structuralist

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 519

model, Wallerstein's ontology posits all of them as necessary correlates of

each other, but are not conceived in their mutual determination or as dynamic
processes that at a certain point become contradictory to each other's exis-
tence. Listen to Wallerstein's theoretical reprise as an instance of the equili-
brium model:

The division of a world economy involves a hierarchy of occupational tasks in which

tasks involving a higher level of skill and greater capitalisation are reserved for high
ranking areas. Since a capitalist world economy essentially rewards accumulated
capital, including human capital, at a higher rate than "raw labor power" the geograph-
ical maldistribution of these occupational skills involves a strong trend towards self
maintenance. The forces of the marketplace reinforce rather than undermine them.
And the absence of a central political mechanism for the world economy makes it
very difficult to intrude counteracting forces to the maldistribution of rewards.14

It would be tempting to cite this paragraph as a quintessential example of all

the theoretical problems in Wallerstein's thesis. In the first place, the notion
of hierarchy is employed in a technical sense, since it is connected to higher
levels of skill, development of "human capital" as a natural resource. The
assumption is that "advanced" capitalist core countries are bound to maintain
their position because of greater rewards. At the same time, the category of
"skill" is employed ambiguously to justify the existence of greater rewards
instead of the category of class or property, relations of force, etc. Second,
the state is seen here as an equalizing instrument that can interrupt the eco-
nomic processes since, of course, it is relatively autonomous from social rela-
tions. Only a force from the outside, implies Wallerstein, that is "interested"
in a different reward system based on different geographic distributions of
skills can alter this circular process. Real persons, classes, and groups with
different interests, programs, etc. do not for Wallerstein constitute the motor
of historical change nor do they form the base upon which the state rests. We
get the impression from reading The Modern World System that it is like a
gravitational field in which there is a kind of gravitational center towards
which nations of both core and periphery are attracted satellites. The system
is the kind of deus ex machina of all social life whose ultimate foundation is
economic, conceived as a self-reproducing system of exchange.

To students of the difficult issue of transitions from one mode of production

to another, Wallerstein's simple model seems to make sense of a mass of con-
fusing events, data, and relations. Its reductionism corresponds to this period
when we are caught in the profound guilt surrounding our participation in
reaping the rewards of US world domination where nearly all others are
assigned to the periphery or semi-periphery because of the hegemonic charac-
ter of relations of force as well as the international division of labor. The
appeal of this model is that it saves us the trouble of making an analysis of

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520

the character of the development of the relations of production within our

own society. These relations are rooted in relations of property. Further, we
may be spared the task of distinguishing between the social and the technical
division of labor, whose configuration changes according to the stage of
development of class struggles and class relations. Wallerstein says he is
grounded in the work of the Annales school, certain European sociologists
and economists, and Marx. Never in his work does he provide the methodolo-
gical and philosophical rationale for this curious concatenation. Indeed, these
tendencies may not be compatible because they proceed from different prem-
ises, not only with respect to their specific historical judgments, but from
the structure of their analysis. For Marx, exchange arises from and mediates
the social relations and the social structure upon which they are grounded. It
is production, with its linkages of the social division of labor with the level of
human relations to nature, that constitutes the determining instance of his-
tory. The state, the bureaucracy, and the market situation play important
roles in advancing or retarding the system of class relations, the specific rela-
tion of social forces. What Wallerstein has given us, following Weber, but
incompletely, is a de facto theory of indeterminacy. The infinity of the social
world and its entropic character is asserted in particulars. This model of the
world system, which embodies the spirit of Weber, is offered as an ideal type;
it brings together disparate and unconnected autonomous structures. In the
process, capitalism is redefined in terms of this model and ceases to have more
than a market existence. Thus theory becomes model building in the wake of
the cunning of history, that conceals all but the surfaces of capitalism. What
Wallerstein has given us is a theory of the forms of appearance of capitalism.
The core of the system remains unseen.

NOTES

1. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System (Academic Press, 1974), 7.

2. Ibid., 8.
3. Ludwig Bertalanffy, General Systems Theory (G. Braziller, 1971), 20.
4. Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism (International Publishers,
1947); Rodney Hilton, "Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism," Science and
Society (Winter 1953). See also E. RKosminsky, Studies in the Agrarian History of
England (Blackwell, 1955).
5. Paul Sweezy, "The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism," Science and Society
(Spring 1950).
6. Wallerstein, 98.
7. Ibid., 37.
8. Andre Gunder Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America (Monthly
Review Press, 1967); Samir Amin, Accumulation on a World Scale (Monthly Review
Press, 1974); F. H. Cardoso and Enzo Faleletto, Dependencia y Desarollo en
America Latina (Mexico City: Sigla Veintiumos Editores, 1977).
9. Max Weber, "Class, Status and Party," in Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds.,
From Max Weber (Oxford University Press, 1946).
10. See especially Hilton, "Transition" and Feudal Society (London, 1971).
11. Robert Brenner, "The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian
Marxism," New Left Review (July-August 1977).
12. Wallerstein, 143.
13. Ibid., 144.
14. Ibid., 350.

Theory and Society 10 (1981) 503-520

Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company, Amsterdam - Printed in the Netherlands

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